cimorene

Wax and I have both been using Ubuntu since 2008 ("Hardy"). Sometimes in the early years when we installed a new system from scratch, the monitor wouldn't even work right until you googled for solutions. But we've never been unable to get everything working before, including SAMBA (local area network filesharing Windows protocol. There are native Unix filesharing methods, but we have never investigated these... although maybe we should start...).

Now in 2022, I'm running Ubuntu 21.10 ("Impish") and Wax is running 21.04 ("Hirsute"), and we BOTH spent several hours trying to get SAMBA to work and eventually gave up after making everything worse. So I just plugged my phone into her computer, then mine, then hers again with a USB cable to share some folders in both directions. 🙃

Possibly we should switch to another variety, but all our attempts to try other varieties in the past have petered out. Debian and Fedora were too much work for me (they're designed not to work out of the box per se). The LXQt and XFCE desktops in Lubuntu and Xubuntu always turned out to lack some key functionality that made us switch back. Gnome currently has the best integration for my Google calendar and other shell extensions like weather, a timer, media controls with hover-and-scrollwheel function, and capslock indicators in the top bar. Ugh... maybe we should try KDE.